The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (21 page)

A
RCHITECTS HAVE
always thought of themselves as artists, and before the coming of CAD the wellspring of their art was the drawing. A freehand sketch is similar to a computer rendering in that it serves an obvious communication function. It provides an architect with a compelling visual medium for sharing a design idea with a client or a colleague. But the act of drawing is not just a way of expressing thought; it’s a way of thinking. “I haven’t got an imagination that can tell me what I’ve got without drawing it,” says the modernist architect Richard MacCormac. “I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery.”
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Sketching provides a bodily conduit between the abstract and the tangible. “Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design,” explains Michael Graves, the celebrated architect and product designer. “Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands.”
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The philosopher Donald Schön may have put it best when he wrote that an architect holds a “reflective conversation” with his drawings, a conversation that is also, through its physicality, a dialogue with the actual materials of construction.
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Through the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between hand and eye and mind, an idea takes form, a creative spark begins its slow migration from the imagination into the world.

Veteran architects’ intuitive sense of the centrality of sketching to creative thinking is supported by studies of drawing’s cognitive underpinnings and effects. Sketches on paper serve to expand the capacity of working memory, allowing an architect to keep in mind many different design options and variations. At the same time, the physical act of drawing, by demanding strong visual focus and deliberate muscle movements, aids in the forming of long-term memories. It helps the architect recall earlier sketches, and the ideas behind them, as he tries out new possibilities. “When I draw something, I remember it,” explains Graves. “The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place.”
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Drawing also allows the architect to shift quickly between different levels of detail and different degrees of abstraction, viewing a design from many angles simultaneously and weighing the implications of changes in details for the overall structure. Through drawing, writes the British design scholar Nigel Cross in his book
Designerly Ways of Knowing
, an architect not only progresses toward a final design but also hashes out the nature of the problem he’s trying to solve: “We have seen that sketches incorporate not only drawings of tentative solution concepts but also numbers, symbols and texts, as the designer relates what he knows of the design problem to what is emerging as a solution. Sketching enables exploration of the problem space and the solution space to proceed together.” In the hands of a talented architect, a sketchpad becomes, Cross concludes, “a kind of intelligence amplifier.”
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Drawing might best be thought of as manual thinking. It is as much tactile as cerebral, as dependent on the hand as on the brain. The act of sketching appears to be a means of unlocking the mind’s hidden stores of tacit knowledge, a mysterious process crucial to any act of artistic creation and difficult if not impossible to accomplish through conscious deliberation alone. “Design knowledge is knowing in action,” Schön observed, and it “is mainly tacit.” Designers “can best (or only) gain access to their knowledge in action by putting themselves into the mode of doing.”
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Designing with software on a computer screen is also a mode of doing, but it’s a different mode. It emphasizes the more formal side of the work—thinking logically through a building’s functional requirements and how various architectural elements might best be combined to achieve them. By diminishing the involvement of the hand, that “tool of tools,” as Aristotle called it, the computer circumscribes the physicality of the task and narrows the architect’s perceptual field. In place of the organic, corporeal figures that emerge from the tip of a pencil or a piece of charcoal, CAD software substitutes, Schön argued, “symbolic, procedural representations,” which “are bound to be incomplete or inadequate in relation to the actual phenomena of design.”
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Just as the GPS screen deadens the Inuit hunter to the Arctic environment’s faint but profuse sensory signals, the CAD screen restricts the architect’s perception and appreciation of the materiality of his work. The world recedes.

In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture held a symposium called “Is Drawing Dead?” The stark title reflects a growing sense that the architect’s freehand sketch is being rendered obsolete by the computer. The transition from sketchpad to screen entails, many architects believe, a loss of creativity, of adventurousness. Thanks to the precision and apparent completeness of screen renderings, a designer working at a computer has a tendency to lock in, visually and cognitively, on a design at an early stage. He bypasses much of the reflective and exploratory playfulness that springs from the tentativeness and ambiguity of sketching. Researchers term this phenomenon “premature fixation” and trace its cause to “the disincentive for design changes once a large amount of detail and interconnectedness is built too quickly into a CAD model.”
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The designer at the computer also tends to emphasize formal experimentation at the expense of expressiveness. By weakening an architect’s “personal, emotional connection with the work,” Michael Graves argues, CAD software produces designs that, “while complex and interesting in their own way,” often “lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.”
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The distinguished Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa makes a related point in his eloquent 2009 book
The Thinking Hand
. He argues that the growing reliance on computers is making it harder for designers to imagine the human qualities of their buildings—to inhabit their works in progress in the way that people will ultimately inhabit the finished structures. Whereas hand-drawn sketches and handmade models have “the same flesh of physical materiality that the material object being designed and the architect himself embody,” computer operations and images exist “in a mathematicised and abstracted immaterial world.” Pallasmaa believes that “the false precision and apparent finiteness of the computer image” can stunt an architect’s aesthetic sense, leading to technically stunning but emotionally sterile designs. In drawing with a pen or pencil, he writes, “the hand follows the outlines, shapes and patterns of the object,” but when manipulating a simulated image with software, “the hand usually selects the lines from a given set of symbols that have no analogical—or, consequently, haptic or emotional—relation to the object.”
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The controversy over the use of computers in design professions will go on, and each side will offer compelling evidence and persuasive arguments. Design software, too, will continue to advance, in ways that may address some of the limitations of existing digital tools. But whatever the future brings, the experience of architects and other designers makes clear that the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks. A software program follows a particular routine, which makes certain ways of working easier and others harder, and the user of the program adapts to the routine. The character and the goals of the work, as well as the standards by which it is judged, are shaped by the machine’s capabilities. Whenever a designer or artisan (or anyone else, for that matter) becomes dependent on a program, she also assumes the preconceptions of the program’s maker. In time, she comes to value what the software can do and dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant or simply unimaginable what it cannot. If she doesn’t adapt, she risks being marginalized in her profession.

Beyond the specifications of the programming, simply transferring work from the world to the screen entails deep changes in perspective. Greater stress is placed on abstraction, less on materiality. Calculative power grows; sensory engagement fades. The precise and the explicit take precedence over the tentative and the ambiguous. E. J. Meade, a founder of Arch11, a small architecture firm in Boulder, Colorado, praises the efficiencies of design software, but he worries that popular programs like Revit and SketchUp are becoming too prescriptive. A designer need only type in the dimensions of a wall or floor or other surface, and with a click of a button the software generates all the details, automatically drawing each board or concrete block, each tile, all the supports, the insulation, the mortar, the texture of the plaster. Meade believes the way architects work and think is becoming homogenized as a result, and the buildings they design are becoming more predictable. “When you flipped through architecture journals in the 1980s,” he told me, “you saw the hand of the individual architect.” Today, what you tend to see is the functioning of the software: “You can read the operation of the technology in the final product.”
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Like their counterparts in medicine, many veteran designers fear that the growing reliance on automated tools and routines is making it harder for students and younger professionals to learn the subtleties of their trade. Jacob Brillhart, an architecture professor at the University of Miami, believes that the easy shortcuts provided by programs like Revit are undermining “the apprenticeship process.” Relying on software to fill in design details and specify materials “only breeds more banal, lazy and uneventful designs that are void of intellect, imagination and emotion.” He also sees, again echoing the experience of doctors, a cut-and-paste culture emerging in his profession, with younger architects “pulling details, elevations, and wall sections off the office server from past projects and reassembling them.”
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The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

The danger looming over the creative trades is that designers and artists, dazzled by the computer’s superhuman speed, precision, and efficiency, will eventually take it for granted that the automated way is the best way. They’ll agree to the trade-offs that software imposes without considering them. They’ll rush down the path of least resistance, even though a little resistance, a little friction, might have brought out the best in them.

“T
O REALLY
know shoelaces,” the political scientist and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford has observed, “you have to tie shoes.” That’s a simple illustration of a deep truth that Crawford explores in his 2009 book
Shop Class as Soulcraft
: “If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate
grasp
on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.”
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Crawford draws on the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the deepest form of understanding available to us “is not mere perceptual cognition, but, rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things, which has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’ ”
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We tend to talk about knowledge work as if it’s something different from and even incompatible with manual labor—I confess to having said as much in earlier sections of this book—but the distinction is a smug and largely frivolous one. All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do. What is true of other animals is true of us: the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. “Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be,” wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. “Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain.”
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To act is to think, and to think is to act.

Our desire to segregate the mind’s cogitations from the body’s exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we’re quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind’s work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we’re aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it’s separate from the body.

According to UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, the illusion stems from the fact that when we contemplate our bodies, we draw on a different part of our brain than when we contemplate our minds. “When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere,” he explains. “When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other.” When different areas in the brain process experiences, the conscious mind interprets those experiences as belonging to different categories. While the “hard-wired illusion” of mind-body dualism doesn’t reflect actual “distinctions in nature,” Lieberman emphasizes, it nevertheless has “immediate psychological reality for us.”
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